Valencia (vi) – Photography Focus 2: Wildlife and Wetlands

by delacybrown on February 28, 2013

Yesterday, I showed you the awe-inspiring, pioneering and back-breakingly costly architectural innovations that make up Valencia’s Ciudad de Las Artes y Las Ciencias. But while I was warranted in focusing on the buildings which have made the “city” within a city famous across the globe, I left out an important feature of the park – its resident wildlife. For at the far Eastern end of the complex is the most visited attraction of all the 6 main architectural sites: L’Oceonografic, a vast aquarium (the biggest in Europe) which, you will be unsurprised to hear, hosts an equally vast variety of fish, mammal and bird species.

There is an inevitable difficulty with photographing the often stunning colourful fish swimming around in an aquarium. The tanks are usually low-lit, and notices remind visitors not to photograph with a flash so as to avoid stunning the fishes. Unless abstract art is your thing, it is practically impossible to capture a moving fish in dull waters with any kind of precision. However, in L’Oceonografic there were a multitude of ponds, marshes, pools and wetlands creating the perfect habitat for birds such as cranes, herons, scarlet ibises, spoonbills, and flamingos, all of which made ripe fodder for my camera. Even better, in the large open auditorium pools, a few dolphins swam and danced around, while in the antarctic area, I captured one of my favourite photos of the bunch – a beluga whale staring at its reflection in a mirror – so cute.

All of the resulting photos, including some rather dazzling shots of stunning ethereal jellyfish, deserve the focus of a separate post, and for this reason, I devote this article to a show of their quite unique and brilliantly colourful beauty. Enjoy.